Robin Swift

Robin Swift is the protagonist of R.F. Kuang's novel Babel, or the Necessity of Violence — a boy born in Canton and brought to England by Professor Richard Lovell to be trained as a translator at Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation, known as Babel. In Kuang's alternate history, silver-work — the magic derived from the act of translation, from the meanings lost between languages — powers the British Empire, and Babel is the imperial institution that extracts this power from the world's languages for Britain's exclusive benefit.

Robin's position is the novel's central moral problem: he is a colonial subject trained to serve the colonial power, given education and comfort in exchange for his participation in a system that exploits his native language and culture. His growing awareness of this position, and his eventual choice of how to respond to it, drives the novel's plot and its political argument.

Kuang writes Babel as an explicit engagement with the violence of empire and the specific role that language and translation play in colonial extraction — the silver-work magic is a literalization of how colonialism takes something of value from colonized peoples and converts it into power for the colonizer. A brilliant and angry novel.

A standalone novel.